The news was all bad—civil unrest in the Midwest, the dollar had fallen to record lows against the euro and yuan, and stock markets around the world were incredibly volatile, spiking and falling. Chaos.
And the resounding theme of the media blitz was unmistakable: you are not safe—you need security.
Philips listened to the news as she sat at the dining room table examining the plastic RFID bracelet affixed to her wrist. She held it up to the light to try to see through the thin plastic band. Boynton had said it was tamper-resistant, and she assumed this meant it had a wire antenna braided into its length that would be severed if the bracelet were broken. The whole ranch complex was littered with RFID readers—she’d spotted no less than six here in the bungalow. The sudden loss of a signal would undoubtedly put her unique RFID number into alarm and summon security to investigate.
Unless she could slip this digital leash, she wasn’t going to be able to escape or do anything else without their knowledge. It was becoming apparent that she was under house arrest—at least until Operation Exorcist was completed. By then it would be too late. They would have taken over the Daemon and solidified their control.
Philips knew an RFID tag was just a circuit attached to an antenna. It used energy from a radio wave to activate the circuit and broadcast its unique ID on a specific frequency. That’s how it could broadcast its location to Sky Ranch Security without needing a battery.
The ISO 15693 standard common for RFID proximity cards and mobile payment systems meant this bracelet was probably operating at 13.56 MHz—which was a commercial frequency.
Philips had attended conferences where hacker groups demonstrated homemade devices able to harvest and spoof RFID tags at will. The question was whether Philips could build something similar with the materials here in the bungalow. If she could make them think she was home when she wasn’t, she might be able to trip up their plans.
The place was packed with consumer electronics—but not a lot of them wireless. She’d gathered the few wireless devices she had onto the dining room table to examine their FCC labels.
There was the cordless phone handset and its base station—a 1.9 GHz DECT unit. Not much use. Likewise, all of the television and stereo remotes were infrared, not radio based. There was the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi transmitter in the laptop. This was a decidedly more crowded spectrum here on the ranch, but also useless for interacting at 13.56 MHz. Of course, she also had her Acura TL car remote entry key, which she recalled worked somewhere in the 300-400 MHz range, but attached to the same key chain she had her RFID gas payment fob, which she had disassembled to reveal a tiny clear plastic bulb containing a spool of copper wire connected to a small circuit board. It was the proper frequency, but there was a problem: its code was burned into the circuitry at the factory. Unchangeable—at least theoretically. And she had no specialized tools.
Philips looked back up at the cable news playing on the television. Now in addition to the fighting in the Midwest, a series of major Internet outages had begun to “grip the nation”—or so the media claimed. It was being blamed on sabotage. On domestic “terrorists” blowing up critical fiber-optic lines at vulnerable junctions. The very things they were doing to stifle dissent were being used as the justification for making draconian measures permanent. And everywhere was video of smartly attired private security forces rushing to rescue besieged towns, to restore service. How was it possible that they could do all this? How could they possibly get away with it?
Philips sighed in exasperation—but then stopped cold. On the wall next to her a message was spelled out in brilliant red laser light:
Your room is bugged.
The butter knife she was planning on using as a screwdriver dropped from her hand with a clang. The glowing message changed to read:
Open the service door and do not speak.
She turned around.
There at the rear service door stood a man dressed in a black
Nomex flight suit, body armor, and utility vest. A balaclava covered his head and advanced-looking night vision goggles covered his eyes. In his gloved hands he held a laser pointing device aimed at Philips’s dining room wall.
She recovered from the shock and walked to the service door. After a moment’s hesitation she opened it.
The intruder ducked past her and closed the door, holding a gloved finger to his lips.
He pulled a wandlike device from his utility harness and started scanning the walls, light fixtures, and furniture with it.
As she watched, Philips listened to the news playing in the background, continuing its litany of financial and social woes. Philips turned up the volume.
Anji Anderson was on screen as part of a panel with other pundits. She spoke authoritatively for someone who had a few short years ago been a lifestyles reporter. “People can’t simply blame others for their plight. They need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, but it appears that some people don’t want to do that. They want to take from others in pursuit of what they call”—air quotes—“ ‘fairness.’ ”
The stranger meanwhile was teasing a small bugging device out of her dining room lamp with tweezers. He held it up for Philips to see, then placed it in one of several chambers in a small metal box.
He continued scanning for bugs as Philips followed him
It took nearly twenty minutes, but by the time he was done, he had located eight bugs in all—from the bar to the bathroom to the bedroom. The stranger then sat down on a changing bench at the foot of the bed and removed his hood and goggles. Jon Ross sighed in relief and smiled at her. “There we go.”
“Jon! My god . . .” She rushed to hold his face in her hands. There was that slight crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiled that she missed so much. Before she had time to think about it, she was kissing him passionately. After a moment she pulled back to look at him.
He gazed back, and then pulled her close, kissing her harder, longer, and with a strength that almost squeezed the breath from her.
He eventually relaxed his hold. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“How on earth did you find me?”
He tugged on the silver chain around her neck, coming up with the amulet he’d created for her.
She scowled. “You gave me a tracking device? How romantic . . .”
“It’s more an amulet of protection.”
“Protection from what?”
“From Loki—and people like him. I didn’t want his machines harming you.”
She studied the amulet and then turned back to him. Philips pointed to the metal box on the nearby table. “You’re sure they can’t hear us?”
Ross nodded. “Bug Vault. It produces generic sounds of human habitation—footsteps, television, stuff like that. It’ll make them think their bugs are still in place.”
“How the hell did you get past ranch security? This place is surrounded by the best surveillance system money can buy.”
“Yeah, they’re using the latest technology—a Beholder Unified Surveillance System designed by Haverford Systems. State of the art.”
She looked puzzled.
“Let’s just say it has some flaws built in, compliments of the Chinese people.”
She sat down next to him. “I was worried I’d never see you again.” Philips looked at him gravely. “But why would you take such a stupid risk to come here?”
“I came to get you, Nat.”
“What made you think I needed rescuing? This is where I need to be. They’re about to launch Operation Exorcist, and unless I can stop them, they’ll take control of the Daemon.”
He contemplated her words. “The Weyburn Labs people have expanded on the work you and I did at Building Twenty-Nine. They’re starting to crack their way into the Daemon’s darknet. I don’t know how they did it, but they’ve started spoofing people and creating darknet objects. They used it to capture Pete Sebeck, and he’s here on the ranch now.”